5 Reasons You Should Outsource Your Professional Drone Services

Outsourcing vs Insourcing Professional Drone Services

So you have explored the benefits of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and realize they can help bring efficiencies, cost savings, and reduced risk to your operations. Now what? The task of integrating drones into your operations can be a challenging feat and will involve leaders from multiple departments working together to come up with an effective implementation plan. The first (and maybe biggest) decision you have to make becomes about whether you should build out an internal drone program or outsource your drone operations to a professional drone services firm. It is usually one that takes time to consider and will have implications on your business, so it is important to ensure you have the right implementation model.

With that said, there is a multitude of reasons why utilizing a professional drone service provider (DSP) can seamlessly integrate drones into your operations while granting you the flexibility to scale in a safe, compliant, cost-effective way. But first let’s examine the obstacles of starting an internal drone program:

1) Lack Domain Expertise

The learning curve to understand UAS regulations, data acquisition strategies, mission planning, hardware, software, drone operating procedures, is a substantial undertaking in and of itself. Gathering this knowledge is only part of the battle. The harder task is actually testing the knowledge you have gathered and going through a trial and error process to knock out the kinks. The end goal becomes creating a streamlined process for drone data collection, processing, and information distribution that allows your company stakeholders to actually utilize the operational intelligence you have gained.

Outsourcing eliminates this barrier because you have the expertise from professional drone service providers, like Skye Link. Their experience facilitates this drone integration process allowing them to manage the end to end process of navigating regulations, pilot training & deployment, and data analysis to help plug in a customizable process directly into your current organization structure and operations.

2) Excessive Capital Investments

Beginning a drone program comes with a significant up-front investment in hardware (drones, sensors, additional accessories for field missions such as batteries, propellers, etc). Then you will have to spend on software by either developing proprietary software and/or dishing out continual license fees for data acquisition, mission planning, data processing/storage/analysis software.

You can forgo these capital investment costs by going directly to a professional drone services companywho has already invested these large sums in their own software & hardware expenditures and built the know how to leverage them effectively.

3) High Staffing Costs

Managing staffing logistics, onboarding, payroll, certifications, training, benefit costs, is just another cost of trying to source and hire your own internal drone team. Eliminating the need to build out a separate department will provide huge cost savings in both the short & long term.

DSP’s like Skye Link offer customers flexible payment options and cost-effective mission rates. This way you can use a pay as you go model that makes determining ROI much more tangible as well as speeding up the time you will reap the rewards from your investment.

4) No National Coverage

Even if you have the capital to invest in your own internal drone program, you can only hire people so quickly. Limited resources, both human capital and hardware limits your geographic coverage. It is usually very expensive and inefficient to send in house pilots and equipment all across the country for missions. Not only will flights and equipment shipping costs start to accumulate but it can be difficult on pilots who have the burden of traveling on a weekly basis. If you operate in a tight geographic area, then national coverage may not be important, but then you likely don’t have the monetary resources to fully invest in points 1-3.

Leveraging a full outsourced or even hybrid model can give you access to local vetted FAA certified & insured pilots, giving you the flexibility to scale your operations and data capture needs on a national scale.

5) Save Time In A Cost Effective Way

Having a professional drone services provider that can take the hassle of all the above 4 points gives you back time in your day to focus on what you do best and still be able to seamlessly integrate drones into your operations. Being able to invest as you go, allows you too see the ROI of implementing drones in a faster, more tangible way. Doing so gives your organization the resources they need to effectively do their job and continue elevating their performance with the organizational boost that drone data & imaging can provide.

Bringing It All TogetherBetween the significant time and capital investments that go into starting an in-house drone program, and the cost-effective, flexible, scalable nature of working with a drone service provider like Skye Link, it becomes a clear choice to outsource your aerial data collection & analysis. This decision will help you save money, time and plenty of headaches while letting you focus on what you do best.

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Our service platform streamlines the process for clients to order aerial services by connecting them to certified, insured, commercially trained pilots and quickly deploying them for various mission types.

Don’t want to manage the process yourself? Contact us to handle aerial data collection & analysis operations while you sit back and do what you do best. We fly, you get insights.